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Brazilian and European Portuguese
A Portuguese
friend related this experience:
"Where are you from?", asked a waiter in a restaurant in Brasilia.
"From Portugal, can't you tell? What language do you think I
speak?", I asked. "Ah, you are from Portugal. How funny, you
speak Portuguese clearly, I can understand every thing you say."
For the typical Brazilian, Portuguese from Portugal is hard to
understand. Because the accent is different, because many words
have different meanings, because we "swallow" the vowels, because there
are words from old Portuguese that the Brazilians preserved and we have
already forgotten them in our everyday language, because, as a melting
pot, Brazil adopts words from other languages changing them into
Portuguese. It is true, language unites and disunites Brazilians
and Portuguese.
Despite everything, to gain entry into Brazil, into the media, the
cinema, Portuguese literature, is difficult. A Portuguese film,
shown in Brazil, would have to be subtitled, to be understood correctly.
News from Portugal would have to be adapted to Brazilian Portuguese.
This simple barrier ends up being another factor in the great lack of
understanding that the two countries have of each other. Because
the reality is this: Brazil and Portugal, despite the investments
and tourism, are two relatives that don't know each other. And
they will only know each other better, on the level of public opinion,
when Brazilian immigrants in Portugal and Portuguese tourists in Brazil
accept the new reality that they observe in each country.
The image that the average Brazilian has of the Portuguese is still that
of "Manuel and Joaquim", symbols of the Portuguese
immigrant of the first half of the twentieth century, rural and poor,
who like the Brazilian immigrant to Portugal, fought for a better life
that did not exist in his own country. A large number of
Brazilians know nothing of the Portugal of today and they are amazed
when they encounter a modern country with shopping centers and state of
the art expressways. The same way that the average Portuguese, who
only knows Brazilian immigrants in Portugal who come from the interior
and the poorest regions of Brazil (in many cases with little academic
and professional preparation), tends to identify them with Brazil
as a whole.
On the Portuguese side there are still some superiority complexes of
historical origin. Many Portuguese do not understand very well how
the Portuguese spoken in Brazil can be like that, sometimes so distant
from the "true" Portuguese, that of Portugal. Forgetting that, "in
the world that the Portuguese created", Brazil is one of the greatest
examples of the mixture of races and of cultures - and this fusion has
consequences in the language. As a country that received
immigration, Brazil has an exceptional social and cultural mobility.
The Brazilian adopts the new with great facility, provided that it is
serves as a tool for work and knowledge (even the Portuguese adopt
different forms of speaking, due to exposure to the soap operas of Globo
and Manchete. We have only to see how the young people in Portugal
use "ciao" instead of the "adeus" of their parents and
grandparents.
"Vibradores" in Portugal are
"quebramolas" in Brazil. "Lombas" is also used.
A
Brazilian would have a hard time understanding that this is "há tremoço
(um tipo de feijão salgado) e amendoins". Sometimes the non-standard
forms are the hardest to understand, especially when written.
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Learning
Portuguese will not only give you an entry to Brazilian culture but to many
others, whether Indian in the Amazon, African in Bahia or German in the south.
Concentrate on Brazilian Portuguese. If you have any grammars from
Portugal throw them away. If you talk like a Portuguese, Brazilians will laugh
at you. John
Fitzpatrick http://www.brazzil.com/
It
is virtually impossible for a native speaker of one variety of
Portuguese to do a good translation into the other. Although there are
unfortunately people who may feel, and announce themselves as capable of
translating/editing for both varieties, their work usually does not pass
the simplest scrutiny of a native speaker. Lyris
Wiedemann what_clients_need_to_know
Are
the languages the same? Then why were the first Portuguese soap
operas to be shown on Brazilian TV dubbed into Brazilian Portuguese?
"A novela Olhos de Agua e a série Olá Pai da TVI
passam na Bandeirantes em rede nacional (nas emissoras da rede e nas associadas)
e são dobradas para o sotaque português do Brasil. A Bandeirantes também
comprou a novela "Morangos com açucar" que está neste momento em
exibição na TVI em Portugal. Comunication
from Portal Galego da Língua
When
studying literature at the University of São Paulo, I understood my
Italian professor perfectly but it took me a good 10 minutes to
understand my Portuguese professor each class (like having to warm up a
car on a frosty morning) and the process had to be repeated every week.
Even then, I did not catch everything he said.
Naomi
Sutcliff de Moraes
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